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I went down to the East Bay Nursery 

I saw the tchotchkes there 

Hangin’ from the walls and ceiling 

Christmas madness everywhere 

I’ll indulge in a clichéd, complaining rhetorical question: Did the big Christmas sales slam always start this early? No, you can’t fool me; I’m so old I remember when merchants were somehow honor-bound to hold off until about Thanksgiving.  

OK, that’s out of the way. Now for East Bay Nursery’s annual holiday ornament extravaganza. There are whole shops given over to Christmas, and probably somewhere there’s a megastore with acres and acres of this glitz. But somehow this one’s more concentrated, more intense. Maybe it’s because the whole thing is crammed into the small indoor shop section of a good-sized city nursery, a place otherwise given over to orderly rows of live green things.  

When you’ve been fondling plants, sticking your fingers in the soil, picking up gallon cans to look for rootlets and all, and then walk into this little gilt-and-glass fantasy, you can get to feeling a bit grubby. (I felt that way once when accidentally sharing a hotel with the Mrs. America pageant. Mother of pearl, those tootsies had four-hour makeup seminars.) There’s that urge to put your hands behind your back—and eventually another urge, for a dose of insulin. 

Still, this year’s crop has nothing musical, nothing spinning giddily and tinkling out that odious Drummer Boy thing. There are the assorted birds, beasts, pastries, Santas and other folks, angels, abstractions, at least one gator and one accordion, and, oddly, a very Hallowe’enish black bat on a purple globe. Somewhere in Berkeley there’s a person who needs this for their tree, no doubt. 

Most of the year, I think of East Bay Nursery, generic name and all, as the Andronico’s of local nurseries. It’s a family affair a couple of generations deep; it’s also the find-everything supermarket. When it’s early in the morning you can count on running into a pro landscaper or two on their way to a client’s, picking up a six-pack of annuals and a dozen eggplant starts, chatting up the staff and vice-versa.  

It’s got those rows and rows of goods, too, like a supermarket, all the better to maneuver your market-type cart through. Sometimes you can even find food, if you were to shoplift—or buy the whole tree in the back row just for the figs it’s bearing. It’s a good way to be sure you have a fertile tree and you know what kind of fig it will give you, what the heck.  

This is one of the few places I know where you can still buy a Schinus molle, the “California” peppertree that’s been around, allegedly, since the Mission days and now is being hit so hard by disease. There’s also space for little obsessions and innovations, like the grand slam of sages that starred here a few years ago, or those odd-colored foliage plants arranged in geometric patterns.  

The place is far from boring, and between the live goods and the pots and tools—always something different—it’s the place for one-stop shopping.  

East Bay Nursery 

2332 San Pablo Ave. 

Berkeley 

845-6490 

8:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday 

Closed Sundays and Mondays 

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